I’ve been looking for single-stroke fonts for a while. I need these for laser cutting. I have found many “single-stroke” fonts online, however none are really single stroke: once I Create Outlines, there is always the annoying, well, outlines.

If anyone has a list of fonts with real single strokes, or knows a way to convert normal fonts to single stroke, sort of a method to get the inner stroke of letters, if that is even a thing... (I saw other questions on this topic but no clear answer) it would be awesome!

thats not entirely true @RadLexus just that there is no common format that would ne understood by normal apps. Many CAD applications Like autoCAD Creo etc. do have such options jist not nesseserily many sources for such fonts... Some of the formats only accept straight line segments on top of this. So you have to make your own fonts out of straight lines. Equally Illustrator can read line fonts, but will end up outlining them in all cases even though the font was not a line. So yes can be done but requires specialized software witj specialized work pipelines.
– joojaaJan 12 '17 at 11:31

4 Answers
4

What you want is a stroke-based font in a stroke-based format and a program that can properly deal with them, and in particular only realise the stroke. There are a few formats out there that claim to be able to do this (e.g., UFO), but I do not know how well they are supported and how many fonts exists in these formats.

Unless I am mistaken, no common font format is intended for the usage you wish, and thus you will never be happy with regular fonts.

I know this question is old, but after I stumbled upon this thread when I was looking for something similar, I decided to build a little HTML-JavaScript app that will make a SVG for you with your desired text in one of the Hershey stroke-based fonts.
You can find it here.

It will create an SVG file which you can open in Illustrator and many other vector-based design programs. It's a bit rough, but I tested it to work in Chrome and Firefox.

With lasercutting getting more popular and accessible, this question also becomes more relevant. I've looked around a lot. There is no simple and consistent method I've seen so far, but I like this method (I came up with myself, but have seen it being used by others as well). I visualized the method for Illustrator here, detailed description below:

Resize to a good size and Rasterize with high dpi (e.g. 300dpi):
Object -> Rasterize

Image Trace the resulting object, using the Image Trace Panel and selecting Outline as method.

Expand the resulting Image Trace Object

You then have a single stroke from complex double strokes/compound paths etc. It is not a "clean" method and results may vary (greatly!) with size of the rasterized object. Changing size has a much larger impact (rather than changing parameters of the Image Trace).

I was looking up this same issue and I've seen the same solution - and sometimes the trace just doesn't work - you come up with a mostly blank tracing result.

I've found that changing the setting of your stroke in your tracing options (Image Trace > Advanced) can dramatically effect the outcome of your trace - so that is an important variable to test if you are not having good results with this process.